MOSS 2007 Enterprise Content Management and Vista Gadgets

Internet facing WCM site performance optimizations

avneeshk — Thu, 31 May 2007 03:29:00 GMT

Ya i am writing after a long break but will post regularly from now on.

So I will share some pointers to optimizing performance for a WCM site.

Master Pages and Layouts as Features

On most internet facing sites chances are you will start with a minimal master page and do extreme customizations. Also you will end up with some custom layouts in the process. I think it is a good idea to deploy the master pages and layouts as features. This may have an impact on the performance.

Core.Js file

Core.js is a JavaScript file which is added to all SharePoint pages and is approx 200+ kb in size which will add a lot to your page payload and slow down the total performance of the whole site. Make sure Core.js file workaround is applied

http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2007/02/07/building-a-detached-page-that-does-not-reference-core-js-but-downloads-it-while-the-page-is-being-viewed-thereby-optimizing-response-time.aspx

There are a few things you have to be careful about which are not discussed in the above blog entry like forms authentication, etc. which I will discuss in my next entry. Anyway this file is not totally useless and is extensively used by sharepoint in administration pages etc. So this workaround should only be applied if you think the internet facing part of the site doesn’t needs it.

Output/Object Cache

Go to site collection settings and make sure Output cache settings are properly configured. I will come up with more details on this later.

BLOB Cache

This is a feature I thinks is the most tricky one and least talked about but makes the biggest impact on the site performance. One has to be careful while using BLOB cache as it can misbehave referencing stuff from style library so make sure it has anonymous access enabled. This will let browsers load the stuff faster.

Look for this entry in Web.config for the site and enabled attributed is set to false by default.

Max Age is the time added to the browser cache header so it retains the images etc in local cache for that much time.

This will also reduce load on backend SQL server.

I am still having some issue with data refreshing in the cache one they are changed in sharepoint but still I think its worth exploring

IIS Compression

IF used properly this feature can make a big impact on overall site performance specially on slow connections. It is a bit difficult to make it work or understand what is compressed and what is not on SharePoint site as most of the stuff coming out of SharePoint is dynamic including JavaScript’s etc.

But anything in _layouts directory will be compressed without any issues including some really big Javascript and CSS files also added to page automatically. These files may add up to 200 kb (not including core.js) to the whole page size so this becomes very important as you cannot remove them from the web pages.

MOSS WCM Performance

avneeshk — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:39:00 GMT

Hi today I will talk briefly about performance of moss based WCM sites.

For my project performance is paramount and we are already trying to work out some difficult issues on the page size and other related issues. First and foremost is the size of the aspx pages server by moss, issue here is that some of the js files added to aspx pages to handle the moss related functionality increasing the size of the page by about 300k which is a huge increase if you are talking about an INTERNET facing site and when the requirement is to support millions of users a day and to have a good response time for pages on most types of connections (less than 5 seconds load time). In normal circumstances this is not a very difficult task to achieve but for a site in moss with the js files and lots of images to make the site look interesting this becomes a real challenge. There are two issues here the size of the page and pages being servered from sql server. I found a very interesting blog on how to improve on server side performance using various features built into MOSS 2007 which I will try in next few days and post my findings here. For the size issue I am still trying various approaches like IIS 6 compression etc. and we will see how it goes from here.

For server side performance here is the link (very interesting read any way)

https://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2006/11/08/how-to-make-your-moss-2007-web-site-faster-with-caching.aspx

Introduction

avneeshk — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:05:00 GMT

Hi I am a Senior consultant working with Microsoft Global Services (Collaboration Service Line).

And yes at last I have made a decision to start this blog to discuss and share issues and bits of information relating to Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Web Content Management (WCM) and Vista gadgets. It may seem odd why I want a same blog discussing MOSS 2007 and Gadgets but I think there is some potential here in integration of these technologies. I will discuss about some of these in the coming few days. Mostly I will concentrate on WCM related stuff.

I am involved in a big MOSS WCM solution for a client involving a internet facing site with thousands of users and more than a few million hits. Also what is unique about this site except for that it is internet facing with lots of hits is the Hybrid nature of the solution. What I mean by Hybrid is that this WCM site works together with some very dynamic ASP.Net 2.0 solutions or we can say modules seamlessly.

Based on my learnings some of the areas to look for when you start on a WCM based web site:

Branding (Look and feel customization)
Security
Site structure and Navigation
Webparts and USer Controls
ASP.NET application integration points
Publishing